


Zahr

by shipcat



Series: The End of The World As We Knew It [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Childhood Memories, Gen, How Sasori became a lil sociopath, Post-Apocalypse, Post-apocalyptic AU, Sasori is a robotic engineer instead of a puppeteer, Sasori is reluctantly sweet on Deidara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 01:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15697134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipcat/pseuds/shipcat
Summary: The world is a dark and broken place. Sasori reminisces on his past; he cannot help but hate the springtime.





	Zahr

**Author's Note:**

> (Excerpt from a Post-Apocalyptic AU).
> 
> EDIT: I will be changing the ending at another time.

There are no seasons in the desert. No colors either. The world was a muted sepia, shaded by browns and golds and on the worst occasions, bleached white.

Time was measured, then, by the migration of the Sunan caravan. It was spring when the adults left to search for life. It was fall when they returned, bringing a wealth of colorful fabrics, discoveries, and a smattering of preserved meats and dried fruits—blissfully uncontaminated by what happened before.

They were searching for paradise, elder Chiyo told the caravans. Their land of milk and honey, with fields of food, and where no parents left their children in the spring.

His mother was a botanist. A scientist. She married a man with hair of rose petals—or so she claimed. No one in their tribe had ever seen a rose, so they took her word for it. Henceforth they called her husband, “flower boy,” for his gentleness seemed doomed to extinction, too.

He was named after his father, as was tradition. _Zahr_ , they called him. Beautiful, sparkling brilliance. Flowers and hope.

He smiled shyly at strangers, hidden behind his mother’s leg. He laughed at his father’s bad jokes and his mother’s cool retorts; and in the summers when they were gone, caught bugs, big and small, and kept them as friends for a while. He cried when he released them, but always let them go.

It was a gentleness that would not survive the wastelands of their era.

* * *

Zahr lasted five migration cycles. The first four years of his life were spent in a half-dream. Content in the fall and winter, he withered in the spring, going about with sleep-rounded eyes. The loneliness was briefly abated by his little friends, who always left when the summers ended, and the botanist and her flower boy returned.

But by the eve of his fifth birthday, his parents are still not home. They did not come back for the next spring, or the next spring, or the next. By his seventh fall, Zahr begins hoarding his insects collection—both poisonous, radioactive and beautiful—only to blink down at them slowly when they died in spring.

His favorite emerald green beetle lays in its box, legs curled up to its cracked underbelly. Zahr pokes it with a stick.

It doesn’t move.

Zahr picks up the box, and several others, and dumps them into his glass scorpion cage. He squats down, blank-faced, and watches as his friends are devoured.

Everyone that left him deserved this.

* * *

Zahr starts to resent spring, then. It is the season of change, irreparable and broken; the season when everything begins to rot.

Zahr starts collecting machines, then. Robotic parts. He dreams of building himself a body that can endure the march of the caravans. A companion that cannot leave.

Zahr is sent on his first migration at sixteen, then. Elder Chiyo tells him it is a rite of passage, that he will receive his new name at a ceremony after. He is told to gather necessities, through trade if able, through theft if not.

On his sixteenth spring, Zahr leaves the caravan, swaddled in loose white clothes, and a hoard of scorpions released into the tents of sleeping Sunans. His homeland would learn the sting of abandonment as he learned it, many, many, times.

He is known henceforth as Sasori, the Scorpion of the Red Sand.

* * *

At twenty, Sasori commits his first crime: the theft of an android, the KZKG-3, known well to young Sunans in bedtime stories. It was made back when Suna was a place, and not a group of scattered people, to bring paradise to the broken world, and stolen by looters from the Iwa sector. The robot’s safe return would make him a hero, rather than a villain.

Sasori does not give up his prize. He’d rather be despised then beholden to fools.

* * *

He will not discover true spring until decades after he leaves the desert. By then, he can no longer appreciate the green finery along the ruins. 

A sprout breaks forth from its seed, leaves unfurling into a bud with soft yellow petals. Blue creeks and rivers trickle out below the crumbled stone, shining bright blue with fluorescent algae. Someone smiles at him from above, and asks if Sasori is enjoying the view.

Deidara is like the spring, colorful and creative. His voice bounces from low statements to high questions, yeah? Moods that shift from hot to cold to hot again. Deidara melts the ice away from his heart, and the scorpion can only beg for relief.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I really hope you liked it~! ღゝ◡╹)ノ♡
> 
> Catch me on Tumblr [ThatShipCat.](https://thatshipcat.tumblr.com)


End file.
